Saunders
by degrassian98
Summary: Maya pinched herself, but that didn't make him disappear. Campbell Saunders was dead. She knew that. But if that were really true, who was this boy standing in front of her?
1. Chapter 1

This is a bit of a prologue! The rest of the chapters will be longer! Please leave reviews below and let me know what you think!

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"I don't know _anything_ about drawing." Maya spoke into her phone to Zig as she rushed across the SoCal Art campus to her first class of the semester. "I don't know _why_ I picked this class."

Zig laughed on the other end of the phone. _So_ not helping. Maya had enjoyed Zig spending the summer with her ex, but he was back in Toronto now, and she was completely on her own for the first time ever. Anxiety inducing for sure, but she was going to make it through. "You're gonna be fine. You're good at everything you do. You'll pull through." Zig encouraged, and Maya felt her heart melt a bit. She and Zig had decided that they weren't going to be romantically connected, but that didn't stop her from feeling a little spark every time he said something sweet. It was just something inside of her. She'd always have that little soft spot for Zig Novak.

"Thanks, Zig." Maya said, hanging up the phone and exhaling deeply. Maya's eyes scanned the buildings in front of her. Admittedly, she was aching for the familiarity of Degrassi's halls. There, she knew what was happening. She knew where she was. It was muscle memory. But now, she was stuck staring at the printed map she'd been given at orientation and second-guessing everything in front of her.

"You need help?" A voice asked, tapping on Maya's shoulder. Maya turned around and came face-to-face with a chiseled jaw, thick eyebrows, and dark, sunken in eyes. Her eyes took a moment to adjust, but when they did... The sight in front of her felt like a delusion. The boy in front of her... He looked like someone she knew. Emphasis on _knew_. In the past. Because this boy... He looked like Campbell Saunders. Too much like Campbell Saunders. But it couldn't be him. He was dead. She knew he was dead. She'd spent the majority of her teen-hood mourning him and seeing him in her nightmares.

The boy cocked his head at Maya before widening his eyes. "Oh." He said. "Uh, I gotta go actually. Late for class." He said, and his voice in combination with the face... It had to be him. There was no mistaking it. It was either Cam or a very creepily convincing doppelgänger. Although, Maya thought, it had to be a doppelgänger, since... again, Campbell Saunders is dead. The words that Mr. Simpson said to her rung in her head again and again as the boy walked away, echoing as he got further away, like one of those dreams Maya had many times. Her fingers creeped up her arm and pinched. Again and again, telling herself it was a dream or a delusion. A hallucination caused by her high anxiety.

After a while of standing still, Maya remembered that she had somewhere to be, so she snapped out of it and headed toward the building her class was in. It was all a delusion. Her anxiety manifested into a weird college version of the dead kid from her childhood. It was time to move on and get through the rest of her day without thinking of Cam's face.


	2. Chapter 2

Maya just couldn't shake that boy's face from her head. She'd been sitting, staring at her phone for five minutes now, trying to convince herself that her anxiety had just manifested itself somehow into a vision of the late Campbell Saunders.

She didn't _want_ to convince herself that she was crazy. She wanted to believe that her mental illness had improved. She wanted to believe that the intense therapy she'd been doing since her suicide attempt had left an impression. She wanted to believe she was growing. Moving past all of this... Finally. But the truth was, maybe she was still just as messed up as ever. And that really felt like a blow to the heart.

"Matlin?" The professor called out, and Maya was brought out of her haze. Attendance was being taken. For some reason, Maya had gotten the impression through every movie ever that college professors didn't take attendance or learn their students names. Although, as she raised her hand to indicate that she was present, she noticed that the class size wasn't as massive as she thought. There were only about twenty other students in her Intro To Drawing class. Much less than she expected.

The teacher continued to go down the list, and Maya found her mind wandering once again. She pulled out the sketchbook that she'd bought for this specific class and opened it up to the first page. Still clean and untainted. Pure and white. She pulled out a pencil and began putting her anxieties and thoughts to work. Just like music, she figured, any art form lent a hand to help escape in one way or another. So if she could draw something, maybe she could take her mind off of all of this. Maybe. Probably not though... She was pretty shaken.

She doodled the boy's face that she had seen earlier, trying her best to remember all of the details. The details that reminded her of Cam, and the details that were different. His eyebrows, like Cam's, were thick as can be, but somehow perfectly groomed. The way his hair fell on his forehead definitely had some Campbell Saunders vibes, though... Was any boy hair _that_ different? His lips, like Campbell's, were on the thinner side, but perfect for his face structure. She tried to list the differences as she doodled, but they were arriving in her brain far and few between. He had freckles that made their home on his nose and cheeks... Cam didn't have that. Although, Maya never really knew Campbell during the summer... So maybe he had freckles and she never knew. His jawline was sharper... But it had been years since the last time she saw Cam's face outside of a picture... People change as they age. And if Campbell was alive right now, he'd be verging on twenty years old, which blew Maya's mind.

"Saber?" The professor said, still checking names off of the list. "Sallinger?" She asked, getting no response. Sucks for Sallinger, missing the first day and all. "Saunders?" The teacher called out, and Maya's heart stopped. She closed her sketch book and turned to look around the room to find out if her delusions weren't delusions after all.


	3. Chapter 3

He was there. Campbell Saunders was there in the flesh. Maya couldn't believe it. The boy with the last name 'Saunders' raised his hand reluctantly after the professor called for him, confirming to Maya that this boy didn't just look like the boy she had lost years ago. It had to be him. There was no other explanation. Unless Maya was just full-on crazy now.

The professor finished up reading the names off of the roll sheet, but Maya had long tuned out. Her brain felt like it was being burned by a white light. It felt like her brain was blinded. She was blindsided. Flabbergasted. Shocked. Taken over. Frozen.

Maya tried to tune back into what the professor was saying, since this class was going to be very confusing if she didn't have it lined out for her, but she was tricking herself if she thought she was going to be able to focus on anything but Cam in this moment.

"…Your partners for the semester…" Maya heard a segment of a sentence that the professor said and immediately, she had a plan. Whatever words surrounded those didn't really matter. If she was going to have a partner for this semester it was going to have to be Cam. Or the boy that looked so much like Cam. She was going to call him 'Saunders' for now, since that's the one thing she knew for sure. His last name. Whoever he was or whatever he was, she wasn't going to keep her distance. She needed to understand the truth and confirm that she wasn't going to end up in a psych hospital for the rest of her life. Because as intrigued and excited as Maya was to solve this mystery that had presented itself, she was also so, so terrified.

As the professor spoke, Maya covered her page with doodles of Saunders. His face was burned into her brain. The drawings weren't anything special, but they captured him perfectly. Him now as well as the him that Maya knew before. The first boy who broke her heart. "Separate into groups of two. There's an even amount of you, so everyone should have a match. I recommend walking around and getting to know your peers instead of just picking the person next to you. I'm going to let you guys talk for about ten minutes and then we'll reconvene."

The classroom suddenly boomed as everyone began standing up from their chairs and beginning conversations with one another. A few people seemed to know one another and immediately gravitated toward one another while others awkwardly looked around, searching for an opening with a complete stranger.

If Saunders wasn't in this class, Maya would be one of those wanderers, not sure of her place, searching for some way to know who she should be working with for an entire semester considering she was in a room full of people she didn't know at all. But luckily, she knew exactly who she was going to try to pair up with. Maya felt herself magnetized toward the boy who looked exactly like Campbell, and before she had a moment to think of a greeting, her feet brought her right to him.

When her eyes met his again, her brain went blank. What do you say to someone who might be the person who broke up with you by killing himself? Does this mean he didn't kill himself? He never had a funeral after all… Or was this all some sort of weird coincidence? She kept in mind the possibility that she was just losing her mind, which felt more and more true as she stood there in front of this boy just staring at him with her mouth open.

Maya opened her mouth and the closest thing to a normal conversation starter slash offer came out. "Uh… Partners?"

"Okay." Saunders said, his voice stronger than Cam's had ever been. And a bit deeper. The only records of Cam's voice Maya had were in her memories, in her voicemail, and in the last video he had left before he died. Even though Maya was angry at Cam for years, she always kept the three voicemails she had from Cam backed up on her computer along with that heartbreaking video he left right before he died.

Maya couldn't keep her eyes off of Saunders. If there was some possibility that this was all just a coincidence this boy definitely would think Maya was just a crazy girl. But that couldn't be humanly possible, right?


End file.
